Posted
by
timothyon Thursday December 18, 2008 @04:16PM
from the bits-o'-plenty dept.

designperfection9 writes "Toshiba said Thursday that it will show off a new line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives with the industry's first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD.
The drive is based on a 43 nanometer Multi-Level Cell NAND and claims to offer a high level of performance and endurance for use in notebooks as well as gaming and home entertainment systems."

No, lending without interest is an Old Testament law written to and for the Jews/Israelites.

If one of your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you. Do not take interest of any kind from him, but fear your God, so that your countryman may continue to live among you. You must not lend him money at interest or sell him food at a profit. Lev 25:35-37 [biblegateway.com]

Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a brother Israelite, so that the LORD your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess. Deut 20:19-20 [biblegateway.com]

IIRC, Islam also forbids the lending of money at interest.
Whereas we in the U.S. are used to a lender taking a security interest in property purchased with the help of a loan, people who subscribe to faiths where lending at interest is forbidden solve the problem by the lender taking a depreciating ownership interest in the property, sharing proportionately in it's change in value (up or down), while the loan is being paid off. The purchaser's monthly payment goes partially toward purchasing more of the property and partially toward renting the part s/he does not own. Rather clever actually.

IIRC, Islam also forbids the lending of money at interest.
Whereas we in the U.S. are used to a lender taking a security interest in property purchased with the help of a loan, people who subscribe to faiths where lending at interest is forbidden solve the problem by the lender taking a depreciating ownership interest in the property, sharing proportionately in it's change in value (up or down), while the loan is being paid off. The purchaser's monthly payment goes partially toward purchasing more of the property and partially toward renting the part s/he does not own. Rather clever actually.

Don't you love it when people get really clever at following the words of a law for the purpose of evading the spirit of a law?

While I'm sure that there are also moral reasons for it, the prohibitions against lending money at interest found in various religions really seem to be designed to prevent a house-of-cards situation like what the USA currently has with the Federal Reserve, where dollars represent debt, not wealth, and paying off all debt would mean no money in circulation, not that you could even do this because the system inherently has more debt than it has dollars in circulation since interest is attached to the money the moment it is created. Just like the religious prohibitions against eating i.e. pork had a real function of preventing food-borne illness for ancient people who could not have known what bacteria/viruses/microscopic parasites are, it fascinates me to wonder whether the prohibition against lending money at interest had a real function of preventing a house-of-cards economy for ancient people who could not have known what centralized banking systems are.

Don't you love it when people get really clever at following the words of a law for the purpose of evading the spirit of a law?

I think it's more subtle than that.

While one can equate a rent/own arrangement to a mortgage in financial terms, and arrive at an equivalent payment stream, when one considers the ownership differences between the two arrangements, there are major differences.

Using the "infidel" concept of interest, the purchaser owns the property and is ultimately responsible for property tax

Re. Christianity, how does your assertion sit with Jesus' teachings? If are you just commenting on how fundamentalists somehow manage to ignore the core principles, I couldn't agree more. So many self-righteous "Christians" are a bit too keen to cast the first stone.

This was one of Jesus' pet peeves and earned the wrath of religious learned for pointing out the hypocrisy in such a legalistic approach.

I'm not sure where this "group that the religion claims to protect" comes from, b

Star trek(in this case, The Next Generation) is popular because, in spite of its message of universal peace, there are still many thinly-veiled racial stereotypes. You're only scratching the surface:

Ferengi: Jews. Large-nosed, money-hoarding, shrewd businessmen. Klingons: Blacks. Ill-tempered, dark-skinned, and comparitively primitive; they believe that all problems can be solved using force.Starfleet/the Federation: Analagous to garden-variety Caucasians. The most pragmatic and well-rounded of the bun

it can't be denied that Star Trek species are often based off of human cultures (and to a degree cultural stereotypes, but to be fair Klingons were originally modeled after mongols/asians), but i don't think that's the reason it's popular.

personally, i like Star Trek (over, say, Star Wars) because of its social commentary and Gene Roddenberry's keen insight into the (potential) sociological evolution of the human race. whereas the speculative imaginings in other sci-fi works generally focus exclusively on f

the speculative imaginings in other sci-fi works generally focus exclusively on future technological advancements while the world's sociopolitical climate remains relatively unchanged

I suggest you improve your sci-fi diet. There are literally thousands of far better fleshed out, better thought out and more interesting and realistic portrayals of the ramifications of potential technological, social and political changes in the future, they're just mostly in the form of books, not crappy TV shows or movies, which are developed using a process that seems designed to filter out most of what's actually good about science fiction.

i mean, the Federation is basically a pan-galactic egalitarian communist utopia. but this isn't just a random utopian fantasy; everything is thoughtfully reasoned and explained in a way that actually makes sense

Not particularly; the technology doesn't make sense, the portrayed capabilities aren't taken anywhere near their logical conclusions, and frankly most of the universe is left completely untouched; let's face it, most of Star Trek takes place on at least semi-military spaceships, of course it looks like a communist utopia; they're mostly crew. The day to day lives of ordinary citizens is handwaved away with a few soundbites like:

once replicator technology is invented, a capitalistic economy and consumer culture no longer make any sense, and want & poverty are also eradicated

But that's bollocks; it simply shifts your economy from being driven by materials to being driven by (utterly humungous amounts of) energy and knowledge. You want the latest and greatest hovercar? Well, those engines didn't develop themselves, the 50 petawatt hours of energy for a small 2 tonne vehicle didn't magic itself into existance, and the replicators sure don't maintain themselves, the software to run them doesn't write itself, even the sleek fashionable bodywork doesn't spring into existance out of thin air. Replicators can't even make everything, so chances are you'll need to pay for some good old fashioned non-magic manufacturing to go with it; if nothing else, some assembly might be required, since replicators seem to have some upper limit on practical size.

But no, Star Trek goes with "replicators solve everything and everyone lives happily ever after, so let's go and do another stupid holodeck episode because the reality we made was too boring to make another show about".

and with nation-states similarly abolished (and without people fighting for resources), a military serves no purpose

Right, making a cup of tea involves generating and moving around the energy of 475 Fat Man nuclear bombs (assuming 100% effeciency at all points) and there's no longer any problem of resources. That sure does make for interesting social commentary. Also, people no longer have any real ideologies, and certainly don't disagree with anyone over them; there's no terrorism or politics, except out in space, where the implications of these sort of energies being thrown about are never really considered, even at times of war.

likewise, religion would be a cultural anachronism in an advanced spacefaring civilization with extensive scientific knowledge

Again, unlikely oversimplification. We have pretty extensive scientific knowledge *now* and still 90% of the planet is still rather religious, and much of the rest have some pretty strange ideas. Commenting on social and cultural progress should typically involve a little more than some just-so stories which completely ignore most of the issues involved.

Sort of. The written Torah is just first five books of the Old Testament. The oral Torah (also called the Talmud) is not shared by either Christianity or Islam, and is arguably more important. It gives you the guidelines for interpretation and understanding of the written Torah. In fact, nowadays, the most important part of the Torah is really the more recent commentaries on the Talmud. They give you actual understanding.

Without the Talmud (and the more recent commentaries for guidance), you would end up with ridiculous, literal interpretations of the Pentateuch (the Christian word for the written Torah) that fundamentalist Christians walk around spouting. (The Earth is 6000 years old my ass.)

Except that previous drives have well-known severe problems with random IO, so I'm kinda suspicious that they specified sequential speeds rather than take the opportunity to say "see, we don't have that bug that everyone else does".

Actually, most of the SLC SSD drives are fairly immune to the random write stall issue that plagues MLC drives. For example, compare SLC and MLC drives from OCZ. The older OCZ Core SSD drives (SLC) have much faster random write access than newer OCZ Core V2 SSD drives (MLS) even though the Core II have much higher specified/published (sequential) write speeds.

OCZ's official line on the frightening performance problems with random writes on MLC drives (i.e. multi-second system stalls and random write throughput as low as 4 writes/second) is "we encourage potential customers to research this product and insure that it will fill their needs. These MLC based drives have extremely fast reads, and if you need a drive with fast sequential (frequent) writes, please check into our SLC based SATA II drive series."

At least OCZ is somewhat honest up front in acknowledging that their MLC drives are not for everyone. But FWIW, nearly all MLC SSD drives are orders of magnitude for real world performance (that includes writes) than their sequential performance specs would suggest.

Currently, the Intel drives are the only shipping MLC drives with good random write performance out-of-the-box. OCZ has announced (but is not yet shipping) a new "Vertex" series SSD that combines MLC with 64MB of RAM cache that speeds up random writes tremendously.

But in general, right now, it's buyer beware if you need fast random write access for higher system performance (i.e. a Windows user). Make sure you get either one of the Intel drives (MLC or SLC) or a well known SLC drive if you're concerned about anything other than strict read performance. Before you buy a MLC drive, follow OCZ's suggestion and do a lot of research on the drive first.

Even if that is true across all implementations of SSDs. For most (not meaning all, as there will be exceptions) people you will end up with faster performance. Especially if you turn off paging of memory.

Random writes are problematic for SSDs because Flash memory writes are done in two steps: erase and write. The erase step always blanks a relatively big block of Flash memory, so to write a 4K sector, a big block of Flash memory has to be read, erased and then written back with the modification. Randomly writing small blocks is therefore several times slower than continuous writes.

mount -o ssd option, which clusters file data writes together regardless of
the directory the files belong to. There are a number of other performance
tweaks for SSD, aimed at clustering metadata and data writes to better take
advantage of the hardware.

There is a small latency with loading a new address walk through in these high density flash devices. Also it takes additional sata/scsi commands to issue I/O at a new address. If you spend 50% of the time issuing and waiting for the drive to lock on to a new address, then your performance will be cut in half (simple). But on SSD you need to seek extremely rapidly to get to that point. on a spinning disk drive the rate you need to keep seeking to heavily impact performance is a much slower rate.

It's definitely measurable on SSD though. Especially if you issue the I/Os in the least efficient way possible, such as treating each as a single transaction, rather than doing a scatter-gather with a long list of sectors to fetch. But that is more a limitation of the interface of sata/scsi/everything-else than with the medium, but it does have a real world impact.

limitation of the interface of sata/scsi/everything-else than with the medium

When everyone in the chain supports asynchronous reads (or writes) via SCSI command queuing, this is largely optimized. Most high-end spinning disk hard drives claim no seek latency for queued reads (as long as the drive knows ahead of time, it can seek while transferring the previous read's data). Sadly, almost no one does this: from the system call through the OS to the controller to the device, just about eveyrone is too lazy to implement anything beyond simple synchronous reads and writes.

In solid state there is no such thing... it's all address based access.;)

For current stuff perhaps, but as a general statement there are exceptions. Remember magnetic bubble memory? Intel had a 1MB prototype once. Little magnetic domains moving around in a maze. Very serial.

I don't understand why you would do that. The only upside that I can see to a spinning disc would be noise, and if you're watching TV, how could you hear it? I'd spend a whole lot less money and get a whole lot bigger hard drive.

You have stone tables? Damn are you lucky! I live much, much deeper in the country than you, apparently. We have to use sticks to etch our data into the sand. Unfortunately, every time it rains, we lose everything. So we have memorize the data, and re-etch it after the rainy season.

Well I release butterflies into the atmosphere. The flapping of their wings changes the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmosphere. These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure air to form, which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays, focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit..

Not a huge difference though... you'd be better off spending the price difference elsewhere in terms of wattage. Buy a more expensive power saving cpu or display and you'll save way more than the 1-2 watt difference between a conventional hard drive and an SSD. Though I suppose if money is no object, you do both.But if money is no object, why not just buy a few more solar panels?

I hate not to be all positive about this, but I'd much rather the prices drop rather than the sizes get bigger. Then again this is a huge sized solid state drive. I wonder if it is actually worth it. I'd like to see some real numbers comparing these drives to normal laptop drives.

A part of me also wonders when something like this will be thrown into the next ipod or DVR. It'll most likely be a price thing that determines it.

512GB hard drive in an iPod?! At the risk of (mis)paraphrasing Bill Gates, who needs that kind of space on an iPod? Even if you ripped your songs at an extremely high quality, that's a lot of music. (Yes, I realize you can put other things besides music on iPods...)

The leading edge ALWAYS takes the brunt of the cost. That's how it's always been... 2GB of RAM used to cost thousands, now you can get it for less than $100. I know you want everything and want it now, but an expensive 512GB SSD will force the prices of the 128 and 256GB SSD's down.

In my experience, consumer flash memory products such as USB pen drives, CF cards, and SD cards actually have their stated capacity available. For instance, I bought a 512 MB CF card that had 512,000,000 bytes; I guessed that the other 5% of the underlying 512 MiB chip was spare sectors used by the wear leveling scheme. (CF is just a parallel ATA SSD in a smaller form factor.) Likewise, if this SSD has 7% spare sectors, it would have 512 GB available out of 512 GiB.

What is sad about that? Win2K Pro still runs most of the software out there, is low on resources, and with timestamps turned off hits the drive VERY little. I am typing this on an old 1.1GHz Celeron running Win2K Pro on 512Mb of RAM and it makes a really great netbox. So don't knock old Win2k, she still has her uses.

I don't think very many failed drives have shown up in the real world yet, so we only have testing and voodoo to go on. I've heard with proper wear levelling the drives should last 50 years or more. But well, obviously we can't say if that's true or not yet with certainty.
The most common type of failure on an SSD I believe is when erases stop working (because a block is too worn). It that point it becomes a read-only device (quite a nice side-effect, I think).

16GB is available on microSD, and I've seen adapters which allow them to slip into a USB slot with almost zero protrusion (http://www.amazon.com/DATA-MICRO-Reader-microSD-interface/dp/B000VE2PCG). Speed isn't great - 48Mbps - but your just booting the OS, and maybe a small app or two, right? If you can go a smidge bigger, 64GB SD are expected "soon." Speed is still low, but many lappys have an SD specific slot (which would also work with a microSD-SD adapter, of course)

They're almost here. $70 for 30GB SSD [newegg.com] is currently out of stock but I'm sure they'll get a new shipment within the week. With each new drive that hits the market profit margins are getting squeezed out. MLC NAND flash chips spot prices are about $1 a gigabyte so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a healthy 100% margin still built into these product prices.

The only way around this is to move into the "insanely smart" wear-leveling that will actually move data when the drive is otherwise idle to re-balance the sector write counts. You wouldn't want to do this during actual write requests, as it would slow them down even more than they are now. AFAIK, no SSD does this.

Intel claims that they do this, balancing the wear across all the flash, not just the part that is frequently rewritten.

If so I'm not going to go run and buy one. I can buy a USB disk drive that has twice as much for 1/10th the price.

I think this is like many other computing/electronics items in that the early adopters pay a lot more than the rest of us are willing to pay until the prices come down. Remember how expensive the earliest CD burners were? Really I'm glad that there is more interest in non-volatile solid-state storage. Over the years I've seen so much vaporware (like the 3D gelatin cubes that are written to and read from with lasers, like a hologram) in this area that it's good to see something that is actually going to b

Early adopters are just paying more early(unless its someone/thing that needs cutting edge technology). They aren't paying the way to make it cheaper for us. It's just an early indicator of interest and a short-term way to start recouping costs. When people make more than the cost it is profit, not discounts that we see. This would be because the MFR makes the same profit either way.

In reality the cost of something is generally (not completely, but generally) far lower than the original price...this is because they know that most things start expensive and get cheaper. Competition brings it down.

When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.

When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.

Yes I do think that cheaper manufacturing brings lower prices. When one company figures out a cheaper way to manufacture something, they can sell it for less but keep the same profit margin. Since it costs less, they'll sell more, and thus, get more profit. That's ONE way to do business. Of course another way is to keep the price fixed as production costs go down and make a greater profit on each item sold, but sell less items. I think more companies lower their prices in order to sell more units thoug

That is correct, but don't forget to include economies of scale. Companies will want to lower the price on their product in order to sell more.
Once they start selling more, they are able to purchase/manufacture the parts in bulk and at a cheaper price therefore lowering the price of their product even more.
This increases demand, allowing the company to sell more and purchase/manufacture the parts at a cheaper price, and lower the cost of their product which increases demand...

Early adopters are just paying more early(unless its someone/thing that needs cutting edge technology). They aren't paying the way to make it cheaper for us. It's just an early indicator of interest and a short-term way to start recouping costs. When people make more than the cost it is profit, not discounts that we see. This would be because the MFR makes the same profit either way.

In reality the cost of something is generally (not completely, but generally) far lower than the original price...this is because they know that most things start expensive and get cheaper. Competition brings it down.

When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.

Sorry but I think you're reading things into my previous post that I never actually said.

Regardless of how it happens, why it happens, or for whom it is profitable, computer storage generally becomes faster, cheaper, and more capacious over time. So, I see that solid-state drives are very expensive and not much better than magnetic hard drives right now and I don't doubt that this will change over time. I'm glad for this. That's all I was saying, full-stop.

When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.

Unless there's, you know, competition in the market. If Company A and Company B are both selling a widget that does job X (they can replace each other), for $Y, if Company A figures out how to make their widget cheaper you can be damn sure the consumer will get a lower price, because Company A wants more of the market, and thus, more money.

The problem is when you run into monopolies and oligopolies, which is a different discussion.

Even if solid-state drives are expensive as hell and not much better than current mechanical/magnetic hard drives right now, I don't expect them to stay that way so this is a step in the right direction.

The fact that SSD devices can compete with Hard Disks today shows not just excellent growth, but purely awe-inspiring growth. Despite being a much smaller marketplace than the magnetic HD marketplace, SSD storage has almost caught up with magnetic Hard Drives.

It shows how hard disk capacity has grown since 1980. Yeah, it's gotten bigger every year... whoopdie doo, right? Notice that this is a logarithmic graph. Each line is 10x the line before, so you really don't see the significance of this, so I rewrote the graph in a "real" scale. [effortlessis.com]

What previously looked like a smooth, predictable growth actually represents a cliff of growth. Capacity has grown so fast that it's been a challenge to find uses for this much storage. We've had to re-invent the meaning of what is a computer in order to make use of so much new found power - over and over, and over again.

And yet, despite having a dramatically smaller marketshare, much less R&D, SSD storage has managed to all-but catch up to this fast-moving target. This isn't just cool, it's incredible. Every year, SSD drives get a little closer to parity with their spinning cousins.

I have an 8 GB thumb drive, but I also still have a couple 1 and 3 GB drives from a few years back on the shelf. This kind of growth is simply astounding!

Don't buy a cheap, consumer grade SSD for a large database that gets lots of updates.

On the other hand, if it's in your budget, and you don't have any other options, *do* buy an enterprise SSD array that's actually up to the task -- CCP claims a 4000% increase in performance after switching to an SSD-based solution for their game, EVE Online.

However, the solution they're working with was priced somewhere around $150 per gig [techtarget.com] as of a year ago. Consumer SSDs are currently priced around $2-3/gig, based on newegg price quotes elsewhere in this thread.

Not really. HDD's can compete (they aren't totally blown out of the water) on most of the metrics though. And seeing as cost is usually the #1 consideration when purchasing, I wouldn't look for these to take over any significant market share until they can compete on cost with HDD's (right now they are generally an order of magnitude more expensive for the same space).

From what is sounds like, the problems of a SSD device warrant a differently designed file system.

There already exist a number of file system implementations designed specifically flash such as JFFS [wikipedia.org], JFFS2 [wikipedia.org] and YAFFS [wikipedia.org]. (I'm sure there are others I have not bumped into yet...)